Those who have seen me speak to customers, know that I have a
"mantra" when asked to compare Solaris to various Linux
distributions. It goes like this:
- Solaris does more than Red Hat
- Solaris costs less than Red Hat
- Solaris is open source like Red Hat
- Solaris runs on more Intel, AMD and Sparc platforms than Red Hat.
As a result, one FAQ I get is, "How much less does Solaris 10 cost?" According to our Sun site and the Red Hat site list price comparisons for support and licenses are:
| Standard service 1 year (5 x 12) | Premium service 1 year (7 x 24) | ||
| Solaris 10 (up to 2 sockets) | $720 | $1080 | |
| Solaris 10 (unlimited sockets) |
$1320 | $1980 | |
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (up to 2 sockets) | $799 | $1299 | 11-20% more than Solaris |
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (unlimited sockets) | $1,499 | $2,499 | 13-26% more than Solaris |
Hmmmm.... So much for the idea that "Linux is cheap or free."
Other important notes about Solaris 10:
- It supports (in addition to our own AMD based workstations, servers and blades) those by Dell, HP, IBM and more.
- It also runs on our scalable (up to 144 processors and 2 TB of RAM) Sparc servers and workstations
- It is FREE to download and use in production without paying the license or service support contract. (Sparc or X86)
- With each update of Solaris 10 you can download the new update (which include rolled up patches) for free as well
- Solaris 10 includes a binary compatibility guarantee as well as indemnification
Red Hat touts a number of new features in RHEL 5 that Solaris has had for years including:
- Multi-level security which was first built into SunOS 4 back in the early 90s and is now included in Solaris 10 in the form of Trusted Extensions.
- Real-time processing which was first featured in Solaris 8 over 7 years ago
- Virtualization which was introduced in Solaris 10 in 2005
- Open source development model which Solaris introduced 2 years ago
- Integrated LDAP directory which Solaris 8 included in the year 2000
- Auditing features which have been built into Solaris since version 2.3
- SystemTap profiler which is a poor substitute for Solaris 10 advanced, award winning Dynamic Tracing Facility
Other advanced, open source features in Solaris 10 include:
- ZFS, an advanced, easy to manage scalable file system
- Service management facility to simpify operation and security
- Secure by default to control network services out of the box
- Predictive self-healing to provide the highest RAS available.
- A large collection of third party applications
In short Solaris is a better "Linux than Linux"
Why should you care?
If you are interested in a data center quality operating system used for years by the most demanding customers at a low price, Solaris should be your first choice.
If you have more questions about Sun's strategy for Solaris and are a US Federal Government customer, contact Sun Federal at 703 204 4100 in McLean VA.
Posted by john on May 24, 2007 at 04:54 PM EDT #
Posted by Jim Laurent on May 25, 2007 at 01:01 AM EDT #
Posted by John on May 26, 2007 at 11:25 PM EDT #
http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/popup.jsp?info=70&intcmp=1169
Posted by Jim Laurent on July 02, 2007 at 04:45 PM EDT #
Posted by Marc Albers on July 05, 2007 at 02:25 AM EDT #
thanks For you
Posted by منتديات on December 29, 2008 at 01:53 PM EST #
I think this DISA director thought UNIX was HP's follow-on to MPE. I know she thought UNIX=HP-UX. That particular DISA datacenter was running IBM Mainframes, HP 3000s (MPE boxes), and HP 9000s (HP-UX). That's it. Their policy was not to support anything else.
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Posted by aion gold on June 24, 2009 at 10:32 PM EDT #
Fedora is free. There are many SME situations where Fedora is just as good an option as RH. For eg: - Enterprise products that are set up as a black-box and maintained by the vendor under AMC. Web servers/Email servers set up and maintained by outsourced facility management teams - typically your local ISP.
I realize this may be a smaller market than large enterprise sales but, at least for this segment there is no reason to buy Solaris.
The only hope for Solaris in the long run is to give it away for free and charge for support and training.
Dovin
ps: We make and sell enterprise telephony applications as black boxes on a Fedora platform.
Posted by Dove on September 29, 2009 at 08:35 AM EDT #
You may not have noticed but we DO give Solaris (and OpenSolaris) away for free and charge for support and training. You can download Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris today for free and put it into production on a Sun or non-Sun server without paying Sun a dime.
Try it today. www.sun.com/solaris
Posted by Jim Laurent on September 29, 2009 at 08:42 AM EDT #
I don't mean to be a naysayer, but Solaris x86 is the reason for Solars x86's failure to do well in the marketplace. The only companies even remotely interested in using it are ones that have already run Solaris extensively in my experience, it's easy to sell to people that already love you (just ask Novell).
At the risk of not sounding "hardcore", anyone who thinks that the "Java Desktop System" is a good desktop really needs to use an OS released in the last 5 years. It's kludgy, slow, and fury-inducing to do anything but launch gnome-terminal (which is important mind you, but why have a GUI?). I'm not even going to get started on CDE other than to state that, while I can respect that people don't like change, it's ridiculous to argue that CDE is in any way more functional than *any* modern UI. I realize that many of my gripes are baed around the UI, but for a lot of non-Solaris people, the UI is really the first interaction they have with the OS, and if you want to push more units, one of the biggest bang for the buck things you can do is get the UI and userspace applications updated to a new release.
The second biggest bang for the buck thing you can do is get some folks working on an apps repository a-la APT or Yum, it's great that I can download Sun packages and install them, but the collection is laughable compared to what's available in APT or even RedHat's Yum (and at the very least, it's far less obvious how to install, it took me about 10 seconds after someone said "yum == apt" to figure out how to install RedHat packages on ES5)
Please don't view my comments as a flame, I've been a *NIX user for the better part of 20 years, and love all flavors in their own unique way, I may be a bit irritated at Solaris at the moment because my department chair at school insists on putting it on our fancy new Ultra 24 lab, and watching students with lots of linux experience struggle to do simple things like run the broken Firefox that came on them to check email is infuriating, and ultimately leads to people preferring the MS platform to *NIX platforms.
Thanks for listening, and I'm more than happy to provide more feedback if requested as well.
(talk about bringing up an old thread :))
Posted by Gary K. on September 30, 2009 at 07:57 AM EDT #
Thanks for your comments. I hope you try OpenSolaris. There have been significant improvements in the user interface, packaging, repository and update capabilities.
Posted by JIm Laurent on September 30, 2009 at 08:32 AM EDT #
redhat is best
Posted by 122.166.45.99 on October 15, 2009 at 03:11 AM EDT #